Boing Boing: Bruce Sterling’s design future manifesto: viva spime!

Bruce’s latest (its been almost an year now) nonfiction is a short book from MIT Press called Shaping Things, and it’s grounded in a theory of design, technology and history that analyses how the tools that designers deliver change society, and how that changes us, and that changes design. Sterling traces the history of tools from artifacts (farmers’ tools) to machines (customers’ devices) to products (customers’ purchases) to gizmos (end-users’ platforms) and to the future, which is defined by what Sterling calls Spimes.

-now what really interests me is that finally someone has figured out a platform or shud i say a “framework” to look at the constantly evolving, tentacles being spread across the wide spectrum of art, culture and technology, interaction design !! and for people like me who have been shifting their places, roles and identity to really understand what the hell is, interaction, emerging technologies,new media art and the list goes on…finally found a ground to define my diploma project with a clearer view… (do check Spime on wikipedia)

or is it just another word which will again become a keyword in papers populated under the domain of HCI, and i will be again (in the loop) looking out for something new, more substantial, more concrete, a central value which will encapsulate my understanding, experiences and knowledge of interaction or new media…

p.s. am i looking out for a central figure to define the decentralised systems (in this case new media or interaction design), am i taking the Modernist way of looking at the PostModernist culture…?? (any Derrideans ??)